Textbook Alternatives & Open Educational Resources (OER): Sample Projects

"An illustrative, rather than comprehensive, collection of examples, success stories, and related issues"

"The Open Textbook Network (OTN) is a consortium of institutions working to help faculty overcome barriers to adoption of open textbooks, increase institutional capacity to support faculty adoption and use of open textbooks, collaboratively develop new understandings and best practices of open textbook adoption and use. The OTN can help your institution start or advance your campus open textbook initiative, and then help sustain it through staff development and networking."

"The University of Minnesota Libraries invites faculty and instructors to apply for a competitive grant to work with library staff to implement affordable high quality content options into their courses as an alternative to high cost commercial textbooks and other expensive course materials."

"The CSU’s Affordable Learning Solutions Campaign is designed to enable faculty to choose and provide quality educational content that is more affordable for their students."

The Alternate Textbook Project is "a program that supports faculty to stop using expensive commercial textbooks and to instead create their own set of learning content that can be offered to students at no cost.."

"The Open Education Initiative is a faculty incentive program that encourages the use of existing low-cost or free information resources to support our students’ learning. Information Literacy will also be emphasized, creating opportunities for students to develop and practice the skills of critical thinking, reasoning, communication, and integration of knowledge and perspectives."

"This new initiative incentivizes instructors to use low-cost or free alternatives to expensive course materials; these can include open-access scholarly resources, Library-licensed and owned resources, and learning objects and texts that faculty create themselves."

"Here you can see participating faculty members involved in the CSU-wide Affordable Learning Solutions initiative."

"Tidewater Community College (TCC) partnered with Lumen Learning to develop and support 21 OER-based “Z courses” that make up the zero textbook cost “Z-Degree,” an associate of science degree program in business administration."